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Harry Potter and all of its characters belong to J.K. Rowling.
I own nothing but the original characters I make.
"Dialogue"
'Thoughts'
-Author notes-
Chapter 02: New Life
The darkness was not like the dark of a closed room, or the deep of a moonless night. It was an utter blackness, a nothingness so complete it had weight. In that nothingness, the first lights were a mercy.
Some of them could be seen moving in the distance, drifting like distant fireflies, while others were fixed as cold, unblinking eyes.
Once in a while, one of those lights would pass very close to him, and it was then that Harry noticed that inside these particles of light were other smaller sparks of light, too many to count them all.
'So this is now my kingdom' he thought.
The irony left a bitter taste even in a mouthless void. Eternal consciousness. A spectator to creation. He had sought to master death, to wear eternity as a crown. Instead, he had been unmade, reduced to a ghost in the machine of all that was.
He thought of Hermione's, Luna and Ginny's last look in their eyes. Regret was now a cold stone in the place where his heart should have been. He had gambled his paradise for this silent, sightless hell.
The memories of his life...one with his companions. The taste of Frostfire brandy. The warmth of a shared bed. The crack of a breaking skull. He replayed them until they were worn smooth, like river stones, until they threatened to lose all meaning. Was this to be it? To watch the great tapestry of existence weave itself, forever apart from its threads?.
This was not the eternity he had been searching for.
Then, a change occurred.
One of the drifting lights did not pass by. It grew. It swelled, not with speed, but with inevitability, like a tide claiming a shore. The perfect dark bled away, replaced by a suffusing, golden radiance. It held no heat, but a profound sense of presence, as if he were being seen by the light itself. The comfort was a lie, he knew. A moth might feel the same, flying toward the candle.
He fell into the light.
Now the galaxies within were not distant whirlpools, but vast, slow-turning wheels of diamond dust and shadow, each containing the birth and death of suns.
He saw spiral arms of star nurseries, the baleful red eyes of dying giants, and the delicate rings of orphaned worlds. He was a thought passing through a cosmos. Then, a single galaxy loomed, its core a furnace of white fury. A spiral arm reached for him. A single, unremarkable star, yellow and steady. A fleck of blue and green and white swirled into being...a world.
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His perception, which had stretched across the breadth of universes, contracted with a violence that was impossible to describe. There was a flash...a jumble of countless sensations, a blur of grey stones, a cacophony of sound, a scent of rain and rot and smoke. Then, blackness again. But a different blackness. A blackness that had… pressure.
'Pressure.' He thought with shock.
He could feel. It was a revelation more stunning than the sight of newborn stars. A weight upon him. A confines. He was somewhere. He tried to move, and something shifted. A limb? A phantom? No… There was resistance. The dull ache of muscle obeying a long-forgotten command.
He could see a sliver of grey light, faint and dusty, filtered through something. He focused his will...the will that had once bent magic and broken lords...and moved again. The covering over his face slid away.
Light, sharp, and agonizing, stabbed into him. He recoiled, a soundless cry in a throat he suddenly remembered he possessed. When the blinding whiteness receded, he saw a hand. A pale hand, fingers slender and unmarked by the calluses of a wand or sword, held before his face. He clenched it. The tendons obeyed. He had a body.
The elation was like fyendfire, burning away the chill of eternity. He was real again. He pushed the heavy sheets back, the fabric whisper-soft against skin that resounded with a new sensation. He was in a bed...a vast, canopied thing of dark wood and rich hangings. The air was cool, smelling of beeswax, old stone, and a faint, floral perfume.
He swung his legs over the side, the cold of the polished floor a shock that was almost pleasurable at this point. He stood, wobbling like a newborn foal, his new limbs unsteady. The room was large, opulent, and spoke of careless wealth. Tapestries depicting hunts and battles lined the walls. A hearth, cold and grey, yawned like a stone mouth. His eyes found the prize: a tall mirror in a silvered frame.
His relentless curiosity drove him toward it, each step a conquest. The face that stared back was a stranger's. Young, perhaps fifteen, sixteen name-days. Hair the colour of spoiled wheat fell in soft waves to his shoulders. The eyes… the eyes were a familiar at least, unsettling green. His mother's eyes. In a face that was otherwise all sharp, pretty angles and a petulant fullness to the mouth, they looked like jewels stolen from his past self.
A human form. A noble's chambers. His mind, honed by centuries of scholarship and cunning, began to work fast as lightning.
The ritual had not granted immortality. It had shattered his mortal body and flung his soul across the gulfs between worlds, a shooting star seeking a hearth to land in. It had found one.
This was a second chance. One that he wasnt sure he deserve was surely grateful for it nonetheless.
He was now a new piece on a new board. But to play, he needed to know the game.
He tested the body. Flexed the fingers, rolled the shoulders. The coordination was there, buried under a layer of unfamiliarity. He opened his mouth.
"Ah… eh…" The sounds were raw, the vocal cords unused. He pushed air, shaped it with tongue and teeth. "Hello. Can you hear me?" The voice that emerged was higher than his own had been, lighter, with a nasal quality. It fit the pretty, cruel face in the mirror.
Knowledge. He lacked all knowledge. He turned to the window, his bare feet silent on the thick Myrish carpet. He pushed the leaded glass pane open and looked out.
A city sprawled below, a tangled nest of stone and winding streets flowing down to a broad, brown river.
Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys. He could hear the distant clamour of a waking metropolis...the bray of animals, the shouts of hawkers, the rumble of carts. The architecture was unmistakable: medieval, but not of the whimsical, magical sort. This was grim, functional, heavy. The castle he was in perched on a high hill, a fist of granite overlooking the chaos. A seat of power.
He was still parsing the scene when the knock came. A timid, scraping sound.
"Your Grace?" A woman's voice, thin with fear.
Grace? Too young for a king. A prince, then. His mind filed the title away.
"Your Grace, are you awake? Your mother, the Queen, requests your presence." The fear was thicker now, a stench almost as palpable as the city-smoke.
A cold clarity settled over him. The first test. He could not hide. He smoothed the strangely fine bed-robe he wore and walked to the door, swinging it open just as she was about to knock again.
The girl looked like a scullery maid or handmaid, by her rough wool dress. She jumped back as if scalded by his actions.
She was plain, with mousy hair and wide, frightened eyes. "Y-Your Grace! G-good morning." She dropped into a curtsy so deep she nearly toppled.
Behind her, a mountain of a man filled the corridor. He wore the boiled leather and mail of a guardsman, a longsword at his hip. His face was a ruined landscape of old burns, one eye half-lidded, the other dark and watchful as a hawk's. There was no fear in that gaze. Only a flat, appraising stillness.
"Prince Joffrey," the man said, his voice a rasp of gravel. No 'Your Grace'. A deliberate choice.
Joffrey. So that was the name. The servant's terror, the guard's cold insolence, they painted a picture of the boy whose skin he now wore. Not a beloved prince, that was for sure.
"Yes, I heard you," Harry—Joffrey said, keeping his new voice even. "My mother requests my presence." He mimicked the cadence of bored nobility he remembered from a lifetime of dealing with the Wizengamot's old families. "And where is my mother waiting?."
The maid flinched at his tone, nodding frantically, her eyes fixed on his feet. The guardsman's good eye narrowed slightly.
"T-The main dining hall, Your Grace… f-for breakfast," the girl stammered.
"Very well. You may go. Inform my… mother I will join her shortly." He found the word 'mother' strange in this tongue.
The maid scurried away like a rabbit before a fox. The guardsman did not move. He stood, a silent, scarred sentinel, his gaze never leaving Joffrey's face. There was a challenge in that stillness. I am not afraid of you, it said. I know what you are.
"You may return to your post," Joffrey said, meeting the man's eye squarely, letting a fraction of the old Harry Potter's authority, the weight of centuries that bleed into his green gaze.
For a heartbeat, something flickered in the guard's dark eye. Surprise? Then it was gone, banked behind the scars. He gave a curt, almost imperceptible nod and turned, his boots heavy on the stone as he took a few steps back.
Joffrey closed the door, leaning against the heavy oak. His heart...this new, young heart was beating with a swift, anxious rhythm. The first skirmish was over. He had not been exposed. Not yet at least, but wondered how long he could keep the charade and what he would do then...
He turned to the great wardrobe of carved oak. Inside, a riot of colour and fabric awaited: doublets of velvet and satin, slashed with silk; tunics embroidered with golden thread; hose in a dozen shades; cloaks lined with fur. The clothes of a peacock. The clothes of a boy who wanted to be seen.
He ran a hand over a doublet of deep crimson, embroidered with a proud, prancing lion. A sigil. A house. His house.
'Who are you, Joffrey?' he wondered while selecting the garments by instinct, his fingers fumbling with unfamiliar laces and ties. 'And what have you done to make them all so afraid?'
He dressed slowly, the fine fabrics feeling alien against his skin. As he fastened a gold clasp, he looked once more into the mirror.
The green eyes of Harry Potter looked out from the face of Prince Joffrey. In them, a cold fire was rekindling. The game was begun. He had a body, a name, a place. Next, he would need his magic. And then, he would need to learn the rules of this new, gritty, unforgiving world.
He took a deep breath, smoothing the last wrinkle from his doublet. "Time to meet a Queen."
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